by Sam Kashner
Newly separated from John Warner, she arrived at the party arm-in-arm with Richard Burton.
They danced together that night, billed and cooed, and Richard drove her back in his Daimler to her rented townhouse at 22 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea. She invited him inside, and Burton laughed when he saw that she’d had the house redecorated, all in lavender. They talked together, as they had over the last four years over the phone, about their children: Maria, who had grown up to be tall, coltish, and beautiful; their grandchildren—on her side, not yet on his. And brilliant, bilingual Kate, who had graduated Brown University with a degree in international relations, but who decided to go into the family business, after all, and had enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. And the beguiling, boisterous Wilding brothers, Michael and Christopher, who finally seemed to be finding their way, to Burton’s great relief.
The press was ecstatic to welcome back the two ex-lovers, and much speculation was given to their obvious delight in being in each other’s company again. They missed “Liz and Dick,” who made much sexier copy than Mrs. John Warner and the clean-living Burton.
The following night, Richard revisited his favorite Dylan Thomas radio play, Under Milk Wood, at a public reading at the Duke of York Theatre to raise funds for a memorial stone for the author in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Unbeknown to Richard, while he was reciting to a rapt audience, Elizabeth quietly entered the theater and slipped onto the stage, standing behind him. The audience was thrilled at the sight of her, and Burton wondered what the excitement was all about. Wearing jeans and a loose sweater, she suddenly upstaged him by curtsying and throwing a kiss to the standing-room-only audience. She then whispered to Richard, in perfect Welsh, “I love you.”
“Say it again, once more, my petal. Say it louder,” Burton answered.
Elizabeth, now addressing the audience, repeated the words: “Rwy’n dy garu di.”
It brought down the house. Flustered, Burton lost his place in the text and apologized to the audience. It took a lot to knock this old pro off his pins, but Elizabeth had done just that. In the theater that night was a young Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne. It was, recalled Byrne, “the most unforgettable thing, perhaps the most theatrical moment I’d ever seen on a stage. I never forgot it.”
Afterward, Richard took Elizabeth to dinner at the Garrick Club, a famous watering hole for theater people. The liveried waiters served Jack Daniel’s on the rocks to Elizabeth and poured two double vodkas for Richard. He then drove her to her leased town house in her chocolate-colored Rolls-Royce, a gift to Elizabeth from Zev Bufman.
When they arrived, the couple was greeted, as usual, by Elizabeth’s entourage. This time Burton took a stand and ordered them to leave. “Get out,” he shouted, and they all scattered to other parts of the house.
Elizabeth took a long look at Richard and said, “Hey, Buster. You’re thin. Aren’t you going to kiss me?” Burton took her in his arms and kissed her.
“I can’t believe it all happened with us,” she whispered.
He stayed the night.
The next few nights, the couple were seen around town, and Burton seemed newly smitten by Elizabeth. He told one reporter, “Elizabeth and I are destined to get back together again. I can’t live without her. I love the woman.” He even penned a little poem on a napkin: “I know a lady sweet and shy,/Oft have I seen her passing by,/Beguile my heart I know not why,/And yet I love her ’til I die.” But—still ambivalent—he told another reporter, “I couldn’t take it with Elizabeth anymore. I am involved with her as an ex-wife and mother, and as a legend. She’s a dear, sweet, wonderful legend—and a little bitch.” Elizabeth was more guarded, or perhaps more coy, in her comments to the press: “I have had no contact with him and don’t intend to. He is a figure of the past.”
Yet it was Elizabeth who would find a way to bring them back together. Not as Elizabeth and Richard, but as “Liz and Dick.”
Buoyed by the success of The Little Foxes, Elizabeth had looked for a play she could appear in with Richard by her side. She considered Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, about an aging actress who takes up with a young lover, with the telling line, “There’s nowhere to go when you retire from movies, except oblivion.” But it wouldn’t suit her purposes. “I knew the role of the fading Southern belle would suit me,” she later observed, but there was no role for Richard, who “was too old for Chance,” the young drifter played by Paul Newman in the film adaptation of the play. She settled on that delightful old chestnut for fading movie stars, Private Lives, by Noël Coward, who had always wanted them to take on the roles of Amanda and Elyot, the ex-married lovers who rediscover each other just after marrying other people. Noël Coward had written the play as a vehicle for himself and his favorite actress, Gertrude Lawrence. He’d knocked it out in four days while recovering from the flu in Shanghai.
It was a kind of siren call to Richard, who was already planning to do more theatrical productions, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and as ever, he still hoped to take on Lear. Richard—sober and looking fit, if a bit thin—flew to Elizabeth’s home in Bel Air to discuss the production. She offered him $70,000 a week for what would turn out to be a seven-month tour. Burton accepted.
For the first time in eight years, Burton returned to writing his diary, where he put down his trepidations about taking on the part. He was anxious about reuniting with Elizabeth in such a public way. He knew what he was getting into—the crucible of public attention and the frenzy of renown that followed her, and thus him, everywhere she went. Though he had mentioned to the press that they might get back together, he wasn’t really sure it was a good idea. Part of him wanted to be with Elizabeth again, but he was apprehensive. Over the phone, Burton discussed the idea with Gielgud, who seemed to have forgiven him his earlier, intemperate remarks.
Sir John counseled against it. “You’re not really going to do Private Lives, are you?”
“I expect Elizabeth will make me do it,” Burton answered.
So Elizabeth and Richard announced their plans to reunite in a tour of Private Lives at a press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel on September 23, 1982. The next morning, the newspapers got it right: “The Liz and Dick Show” was back in business. There was no backing out now, especially when the play was announced in the New York Times with an ad showing an enormous heart with an arrow through it, and the words: “Together Again.” Elizabeth had always been a genius about publicity. “I’m ready for Nouveau York,” she proclaimed.
They began rehearsals on the second week of March 1983, in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on West 46th Street, where Richard had triumphed in Hamlet a lifetime ago. Elizabeth moved into Rock Hudson’s apartment in the Beresford on West 81st Street, with stunning views of Central Park. Burton checked into the Lombardy. The next day, Maria dropped by Burton’s hotel with her new baby, and they went to visit Elizabeth in the Beresford. It was a happy family reunion. Burton looked around Rock Hudson’s apartment and noticed—with a sneer, no doubt—that there wasn’t one single book in the place.
Burton was still on the wagon, but John Cullum, who played the discarded spouse Victor Prynne in the four-character play, and who had been Laertes to Richard’s Hamlet, was alarmed at how fragile Burton looked when he showed up for rehearsals. “He’d lost all the weight in his torso,” Cullum recalled. “His voice was the same, but he didn’t have the strength that he’d had, because he was always so virile. But he put himself through it.” Cullum thought the whole experience was surreal. “It was a weird company,” he said. “Let me tell you. She was the boss.” Elizabeth later demurred, “Believe me, I’ve had the tact not to point out to Richard that now he’s my employee,” but Richard was well aware of it.
Burton recorded his frustration with trying to work with Elizabeth, who had gone back to her old bad habits. “E…. drinking. Also, has not yet read the play! That’s my girl!…This is going to be a long seven months.” But by March 27, something cl
icked and Elizabeth suddenly pulled it all together and “was tremendously better” “for the first [time] I enjoyed rehearsals,” Burton recorded.
Cullum also found it difficult to rehearse with Elizabeth, mostly because she didn’t really want to rehearse. As an actress, Cullum believes, “Elizabeth was a natural. She was one of the most skillful film actresses you’d ever met. She just didn’t have very much stage experience. For instance, when I first met with her, I suggested we run through the lines; she didn’t want to do that, because I think her attitude was, it would take the edge off the performance. That’s okay for film, but if you have to get jacked up for every performance, it’s gonna kill you.”
Cullum noticed, too, how Elizabeth couldn’t handle certain lines during rehearsals. When she was having trouble with a reference to a hotel in Deauville on the French Riviera, “Richard started laughing, and Elizabeth just blew up and screamed, ‘What in the hell are you laughing about, you silly ass!’ And he said, ‘Darling, we stayed at that hotel for over two months!’ All the places in Private Lives—they had lived them.”
The play opened in Boston on April 13, 1983, to a sold-out run, standing ovations, and three curtain calls for Elizabeth. Burton gave Elizabeth a long kiss at the end of the evening, and the audience went wild. Their entry into Boston via Logan Airport had been a reprise of their Hamlet tour, with large crowds greeting them, many waving copies of Kitty Kelley’s scathing biography of Elizabeth, The Last Star, for Elizabeth to autograph.
The opening in New York on May 9, 1983, “was a circus,” Brook Williams recalled. Crowds filled the streets around the theater, waiting for a sight of Elizabeth, who showed up with her pet parrot on her shoulder, which she kept in her dressing room and later took to bringing onstage with her in the final scene. The curtain of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was raised thirty-five minutes late, and the first intermission lasted longer than the entire first act.
Burton seethed backstage—he was the most punctual of actors; he hated to be late; he was a Spartan about things like that no matter what condition he was in at the time. He fumed in his dressing room (where he’d hung the Welsh flag on one of its red felt walls). Elizabeth was sober—she never touched a drop before the show—as she got ready in her lavender dressing room, complete with shirred chintz curtains, lavender towels, silk flowers, and a hundred-gallon aquarium. (Their specially redesigned dressing rooms were so spectacular that they were featured in Architectural Digest.) “Elizabeth would be there, chatting away, getting her makeup on, five to ten minutes before curtain,” Cullum recalled, “and Richard would just be beside himself!” Brook Williams served Richard tea and made small talk, trying to calm him down.
“This just proves it,” Burton complained to Brook. “I can never get together with that woman again.” Elizabeth took so long to do her makeup, he started insisting that she be made up at her apartment before coming to the theater. (She often ended up doing it in the limousine on the way over.)
Despite first-night problems, the sold-out house rose to their feet and gave Elizabeth and Richard five curtain calls. Every opening night on the tour would be like that as the production headed west: Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles. But what became clear from that first night was that audiences were cheering “The Liz and Dick Show” more than Noël Coward’s witty play.
“They had lived Private Lives,” Cullum realized, “and that’s why it didn’t work. It was a caricature.” It was supposed to be a drawing-room comedy, not a parody, but there were too many parallels, just as there had been in Cleopatra, The V.I.P.s, The Sandpiper, The Taming of the Shrew, Boom!, Divorce His Divorce Hers. But now the parallels weren’t dramatic; they were comic. The audience knew the public life behind the drama of Private Lives, so their repartee had a triple-entendre effect.
First of all, Elyot’s new wife is named Sibyl (played by Charlotte Moore, who replaced Kathryn Walker). Lines like Amanda’s “Poor Sibyl…. I suppose she loves you terribly” and Elyot’s “Not as much as all that. She didn’t have a chance to get really underway” announced that the play was really all about Elizabeth and Richard.
When Elizabeth/Amanda tells Richard/Elyot, “Eight years all told, we’ve loved each other. Three married and five divorced,” it just ran too close to the truth. And when Richard tells Elizabeth that she has “No sense of glamour. No sense of glamour at all,” the audience guffawed. Elizabeth’s line “I feel rather scared of marriage, really” brought another huge laugh and that weird feeling of being in a parallel universe. When Elizabeth asked, “How long will it last, this ludicrous, overbearing love of ours?…Shall we always want to bicker and fight?” Richard answered, “No, that desire will fade, along with our passion.”
More truths were told, in the guise of Amanda and Elyot. Elizabeth: “I believe it was just the fact of our being married, and clamped together publicly, that wrecked us before.”
Richard: “That, and not knowing how to manage each other.”
Elizabeth: “Do you think we know how to manage each other now?” The audience’s heads were spinning. When Elizabeth said, “This week’s been very successful,” looking out over the full house, “Liz and Dick” merged completely with Amanda and Elyot.
Though audiences lapped it up, paying $45 for the best seats, the reviews were the worst either had ever received in their long careers. The critics—not quite ready to embrace camp when they saw it—hooted and jeered. Frank Rich in the New York Times called it “a calculated business venture,” a “trashily amusing old-time burlesque stunt,” in which “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton look whipped and depressed.” He noted that Burton seemed “robotic” (he could barely move his arms and shoulders without pain). At one point, Burton/Elyot tweaks Elizabeth/Amanda’s breast (or honks it, as one playgoer recalled), but does so, Frank Rich thought, with “the clinical detachment of a physician who’s examined too many patients in one day.” James Brady compared Elizabeth’s acting to “the Hitler Diaries—you don’t believe it, but you gotta look.” The Christian Science Monitor lamented, “They have become one word: Liz’n’Dick…condemned to be Antony and Cleopatra in an endless sequel of daily life…Their flight to personal freedom two decades ago has turned them into a kind of public slavery. They have become our dancing bears with permanent iron collars on their necks.” Variety cruelly wrote, “The Dance of Death would have been a more appropriate choice.” People magazine noted the play by running a tongue-in-cheek dictionary entry for “Lizandick”:
LIZANDICK (‘liz n ‘dik) n. pl. [contemporary usage fr. Liz and Dick, often followed by exclamation point, i.e., Lizandick!] 1. Archaic. Mythic American actress and Welsh actor whose names were eternally coupled despite their celebrated uncoupling(s). 2. Aging and ever expanding histrionic duo whose sum is greater than their individual parts, and whose mutual moves are perpetually played out in public (Did you hear that ~ started a limited-run revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in Boston last week?) 3. Any pair of people who come together, split, come together, split, until they seem to make a profession of it or until their acquaintances move past empathy to ennui.
Elizabeth tried to avoid reading the reviews, but it was impossible. The Boston Globe notice brought her to tears (“a caricature of a Coward heroine, inside a caricature of an actress, inside a caricature of [Elizabeth] Taylor”). Cullum saw that “she was hurt, and she didn’t quite understand why they were so vicious. But she was a trouper. You had to admire her, because they said awful things, and the delight with which they attacked a person who was so famous and so wonderful! They were enjoying it.” The bad notices shortened the New York run of the play by several weeks, yet Elizabeth and Richard soldiered on. The New York Post screamed, “Liz & Dick: Damn the critics, full speed ahead!” and “It’s Liz & Dick vs. the Critics.”
In fact, the press had never had it so good. They were reliving their salad days as well, feasting on speculation over whether the couple would reunite, devoting whole columns to the phenomenon of “Liz
and Dick.” New York Times columnist Russell Baker got into the act, as did the Daily News’s Jimmy Breslin, who met Burton at the Lombardy for an interview. They discussed the actor’s well-known battles with alcohol. “I wouldn’t have missed any of it for the world,” he said. “I have to think hard to name an interesting man who didn’t drink.” Burton also mentioned how appalled he was with the trend he’d noticed in New York restaurants to order just a small glass of white wine in lieu of real drinking. “When the hell did that start?” he asked Breslin, himself a two-fisted drinker. “…[T]he other night I heard a man say, ‘I’ll have a vodka martini straight up.’ I turned to [him] and said, ‘Well done. You’re having a proper drink.’”
One night, Elizabeth and Richard went to Sardi’s after the show, and Richard proceeded to give her notes on her performance. They both started drinking heavily. “It didn’t take much to get Richard off the wagon,” Cullum observed. “In any case, the next night, Elizabeth didn’t show up, so he had to go on with the understudy. Richard was incensed. And she didn’t show up on Thursday, and on the Friday and Saturday, he had to play two shows with the understudy. She was quite good, but he didn’t contract to play with anybody else. And he knew that Elizabeth was ticked off because of the notes he’d given her. So he got more and more angry…And sure enough, Monday morning, which was our day off, he said he would not play anymore with the understudy. And he disappeared.”